Buying concert tickets has gone high tech

Ins and outs for best buys

What are the best ways to get the best tickets for pop-music concerts that sometimes seem to sell out in a matter of minutes?

The answer can vary from tour to tour, artist to artist and venue to venue, but these are some methods worth considering. (We have opted not to include ticket resale agencies or such websites as StubHub, which require fans to bid for tickets that are being resold at higher prices.)

FAN CLUBS

Joining an artist’s fan club — whether it’s Miley Cyrus, Pearl Jam or San Diego’s blink-182cq — can pay off big. Fan club members often have access to buy presale tickets at face value, ahead of the general public, giving them access to some of the best seats and fewer people to compete with to get them. Some fan club memberships are free, but most acts (including U2, AC/DC and the Jonas Brothers) charge annual dues.

CREDIT CARDS

Sure, you can pay for your tickets with credit or debit cards (and you have no other option if you’re buying them online). But American Express and Citibank often sponsor entire tours by major artists, the better to offer cardholders access to presale tickets and periodic special offer discounts. Last week, j11American Express was offering presale tickets to several Midwestern dates on Paul McCartney’s summer tour, at prices ranging from $58.50 to $250, five days before they went on sale to the general public. American Express was also recently offering presale tickets for acts as varied as Arcade Fire, Aerosmith and The Eagles.

VIP PACKAGES

If money really is no object, McCartney fans can buy a Front Row Packagecq for $2,000 per person, a Hot Sound Package cq($1,500) or a Gold Hot Seat Packagecq ($550). Dutch classical-schlock violinist Andre Rieu, who performs Dec. 1 at the San Diego Sports Arena, has VIP packages that cost $1,500 each and include the opportunity to meet him at a post-show dinner. VIP packages for teen-pop idol Justin Bieber’s Oct 30 Sports Arena show are a comparatively reasonable $359.50 each, but do not include any face time with Bieber or his carefully coifed head of hair. Among the companies offering VIP packages are I Love All Access, Musictodaycq and SLO,cq which are all owned by Live Nation.

VENUE MEMBERSHIPS

Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre and the San Diego Sports Arena both offer annual membership packages that provide exclusive ticket-ordering privileges for prime seats and an array of VIP amenities that range from premium parking and a private entrance to VIP club access at the two venues. For concerts at Cricket, San Diego’s largest outdoor music venue, there are box-seat packages (which include personal drink and food service at your seats) and season ticket packages (which do not). The price is on a sliding scale, depending on how many concerts you opt to buy tickets for, from $1500 for a ticket to five upcoming Cricket concerts, to $3,000 for 18 upcoming shows at the venue. For concerts at the Sports Arena, San Diego’s largest indoor concert venue, music fans of means can pay $2,450 each to be Club 3500 members. Membership enables you to buy four tickets, usually in the loge section near the stage, for every Sports Arena event. You also get access to the arena’s private new Club 3500, which opened last October.

NEWSLETTERS AND E-MAIL BLASTS

By signing up for the free Arena Connection Newslettercq (sandiegoarena.com), you can get advance information about new shows at the Sports Arena and concert on-sale dates. Some other local venues also have free mailing lists. The website justmyticket.com, which operates in cities nationwide, lets you become a member for free and offers as much as 50 percent off tickets for various events.

PROCRASTINATE

Seriously. By waiting until the last minute, you can sometimes get prime seats at no extra charge that are quietly released for sale the day of a show (sometimes, just minutes before starting time). But act quickly. For a short while on June 10, Ticketmaster offered a limited number of tickets for Sting’s June 11 concert in Denver — for 75 centscq each — “for friends and family.” Exactly whose friends and family remains unclear. But the Ticketmaster link and password for these bargain basement tickets were quickly posted and shared on phishhook.com,cq a Web site frequented by fans of the band Phish,cq and at least some acted quickly enough before all of the 75 cent tickets were snapped up.

SHARE (OR BUY) PASSWORDS

Most fan clubs provide each member with unique passwords to buy tickets that can only be used by them. But credit card companies, tour sponsors and individual venues sometimes send their customers passwords that can be shared. For a fee, the website presalepassword.com (favored by ticket brokers) compiles passwords for concerts across the nation, including an upcoming San Diego show by the French band Phoenixcq at the SDSU Open Air Theatre.

GET A ROOM

To get center section seats in the first four rows at Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay, you’ll need to pay for an overnight stay at the adjacent Half Moon Inn & Suites. The price, which can rise as high as $599 per couple, is steep, but there are lots of takers. “We have 31 overnight packages per show, and we sell 75 percent of them,” said Bobbi Brieske,cq Humphrey’s veteran concert manager. Too pricey? Dinner packages ($98-$129 per person) will get you center seats in rows 5-7 and seats in rows 1-7 on the sides. “We sell 95 precent of those,” Brieske noted.

-- GEORGE VARGA

Back in olden times — you know, the early 1990s — buying concert tickets to see your favorite pop-music artist was a fairly simple process.

You bought your ticket in advance — first come, first served — or at the door the night of the show (assuming it hadn’t sold out). The price for tickets at the front of the venue, the rear and points in between was usually the same, or very close in price. That made things easy for most music fans, especially in the summer, when the outdoor concert season traditionally heats up and the number of performances taking place each week can easily double or triple.

Not so today, when all but the most mathematically gifted may require a calculator, a computer and a high-speed Internet connection to figure out the dizzying array of ticket-buying options and the similarly broad range of prices. To cite one recent example, when tickets went on sale earlier this year for Sting’s summer tour — which included a June 13 concert at Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre in Chula Vista — four different presales took place before the general public got a crack at buying seats.

American Express card members could buy tickets, at face value ($32.35-$153.75), between March 3 and March 9. Premium Ticket Packages, which cost $175 more than the face value of each ticket, were available March 3 and March 10, while two different Sting fan club ticket options went on sale from March 10 to March 12. Tickets for the general public didn’t go on sale until March 15. Since then, tickets for Sting’s concert have been resold by fans, ticket resale agencies and scalpers (although there is often a fine line between the last two).

All these different ticket-buying options and prices might seem dizzying to a casual music fan who doesn’t have a background in accounting, especially as the prices for the best tickets continue to soar to record highs. But these myriad options qualify as business as usual for a live-music industry that is increasingly seeking to maximize profits — and for those avid concertgoers for whom money is no object to secure the best seats at any cost.

“There are so many different options now, in terms of where and when to get tickets these days, and I use a lot of them depending on the concert,” said Jeff Grossman, who is the president and CEO of San Diego’s Caps and Tabs Inc., which manufactures nutritional supplements.

To ensure he has the best shot at getting choice tickets, Grossman uses a number of resources, including his American Express and Citibank credit cards and his membership in the San Diego Sports Arena’s Club 3500. In addition, he is a member of the San Diego Padres’ Founders Club, which includes season tickets for dugout seating at Petco Park. This in turn enabled him to buy sixth-row tickets for Madonna’s 2008 Petco concert and onstage tickets for the Rolling Stones’ 2005 Petco show.

“I’ve also used the Web site charityfolks.com, which offers a ‘once in a lifetime experience’ where you get front-row seats and get to meet the artists,” Grossman said. “I did that for the MTV Video Music Awards a few years ago and, yes, it was expensive. Other ticket opportunities come by invitation through my American Express Centurion card membership, which is how I got my Grammy Award tickets this year. It does get confusing, because there are so many choices for getting tickets now.”

The constantly growing number of options for ticket buyers is both a concern and a boon for Bill Silva, who is the manager of Grammy Award-winning Oceanside troubadour Jason Mraz.

Silva, who used to manage top pop-punk band blink-182, was San Diego’s leading locally based concert promoter for much of the 1980s and 1990s For the past two decades, he and his business partner, Andrew Hewitt, have exclusively booked pop-music concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, where this year they will stage the most concerts (24) they ever have in one season.

“I don’t particularly like doing multiple presales, because it gets confusing,” Silva said. “By the same token, working with American Express really helps us. They have a huge marketing budget that provides exposure in the market for the artists we present that we might not otherwise be able to have. So, we’re getting the message out to people better and more quickly. And the amount of business we do selling tickets through American Express alone is staggering. Sometimes we sell out half the Hollywood Bowl, which seats nearly 18,000, just through the various presales.”

American Express began offering special concert ticket access to its members in the nation’s largest markets in 1990, the same year Silva and Hewitt began booking shows at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1996, the company introduced ticket presale options for concerts in San Diego and is currently offering tickets for upcoming shows here: Andre Rieu, and a classic-rock double-bill of Peter Frampton and Yes, as well as the touring production of the TV show “Yo Gabba Gabba.”

“The concert ticket presales we offer are definitely very successful and are one of the benefits our card members know and love,” said Sarah Meron, an American Express Corporate Affairs representative in New York.

Grossman and Silva both sound nostalgic about the pre-Web days, when most concert tickets were usually uniformly priced for a show and fans lined up at the venue box offices or at ticket outlets in department stores and at Tower Records outlets. All that changed in 1994 when Pink Floyd launched a North American tour, which included a sold-out date at Jack Murphy (now Qualcomm) Stadium in Mission Valley.

“That was the first rock tour to have two distinctly different ticket prices — I think it was $40 and $60 — and there was absolutely no resistance from the public,” said Gary Bongiovanni, the publisher of Pollstar, the concert industry’s leading weekly trade publication.

“The Rolling Stones toured later that year and used the same model, with two ticket prices. Then, also in 1994, The Eagles did their ‘Hell Freezes Over’ reunion tour and dared to ask $100 per ticket, and they got it. If those three tours had failed, the concert world would be different now. But the public voted with their wallets and said that’s what they wanted. And now look where we are.”